High-performance mobile terminals, such as mobile phones and smartphones, are in widespread use. The use of such mobile terminals improves convenience in the delivery of tickets for events, such as concerts and plays, and the management of attendees to the events. For example, to each person who has paid admission to an event, a server managing ticket sales transmits a credential representing a ticket for the event as electronic data instead of providing a conventional paper ticket. The credential is encoded into, for example, a two-dimensional code and then transmitted. An example of a two-dimensional code is a Quick Response (QR) Code®. For example, in the case where an attendee has received a two-dimensional code as a credential for an event, the attendee displays the two-dimensional code on the screen of his/her mobile terminal at an entrance gate of the event site and allows an authentication apparatus to read the two-dimensional code on the screen. The authentication apparatus determines whether the attendee is legitimate based on the content of the two-dimensional code. Alternatively, the credential may be stored in an integrated circuit (IC) card embedded in a membership card of the attendee. In this case, the attendee holds the IC card over the authentication apparatus at the entrance gate of the event site to allow the authentication apparatus to read the credential. Then, the authentication apparatus determines whether the attendee is legitimate based on the content of the read credential.
Note that as a system for managing attendees, there has been proposed a reception support system for extracting, for example, upon receiving information on an attendee from a reception apparatus, information identifying the attendee from the received information to create a message and then transmitting the created message to a terminal of a person assigned to serve the attendee.
See, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2007-249872.
To determine whether to grant or refuse the admission of each attendee at an entrance gate to an event site, a plurality of authentication apparatuses are prepared in order to manage admission of a large number of attendees to the event site. For example, if there are a plurality of entrance gates, one or more authentication apparatuses are installed at each of the entrance gates.
In the case where there are a plurality of authentication apparatuses, a single credential distributed as electronic data involves the risk of being used multiple times. Sharing authentication execution information, which indicates whether each attendee has undergone an authentication process to enter the event site, across the authentication apparatuses is considered as one way to prevent credentials each distributed as electronic data from being used multiple times. For example, in the case where a credential is illegally copied, more than one attendee is able to enter the event site with the single credential if the authentication apparatuses do not share the authentication execution information. When the authentication execution information is shared, each authentication apparatus is able to refuse authentication of an attendee using a credential already used to authenticate a different attendee by a different authentication apparatus.
In the case where authentication execution information is shared by a plurality of authentication apparatuses, it is possible, for example, to allow authentication execution information of the entire system to be shared by all the authentication apparatuses. In this case, a synchronization process of the authentication execution information (a process for allowing the same content to be shared) is carried out among the authentication apparatuses in order to maintain the consistency of the content of the authentication execution information. As long as the individual authentication apparatuses have the authentication execution information of the same content, each of the authentication apparatuses is able to detect duplicate authentication even if the authentication apparatus is cut off from communication with a server in a center, thus enhancing the convenience of the authentication apparatuses.
In the case of carrying out the synchronization process of the authentication execution information among the authentication apparatuses, exchanging all the authentication execution information in each synchronization process incurs a communication traffic overload, resulting in an increased processing load. In view of this, it is considered to transmit only authentication execution information updated after the previous synchronization process (difference information) to each of the authentication apparatuses. As a way of extracting the difference information from the authentication execution information, extracting authentication execution information updated, for example, after the previous synchronization processing time may be considered. The extraction of the difference information using the time information involves setting the clock on each authentication apparatus in an accurate manner. However, accurate time setting of a number of authentication apparatuses needs sophisticated skills, increasing the processing load of the entire system.
Thus, allowing the plurality of authentication apparatuses to have the authentication execution information of the same content leads to increased processing loads due to synchronization processing of the authentication execution information. Therefore, it is important to perform the synchronization processing more efficiently.